Catalysts
by nb41
Summary: Meeting people winds up being a catalyzing event in Jane Foster's life more often than not.


For Jane Foster Week, Day 4: Relationships. Small bit of Jane/Thor.

* * *

She meets Erik for the first time when she's five years old. She only remembers it in fragments, and suspects her memories are just re-imaginings from what her father and mother have told her rather than real recollections.

They insist she handed him one of her father's star charts which she had turned into a connect the dots (to her father's chagrin), and he'd helped her trace a few more: Cassiopeia, Draco, Scorpius. When her father expressed dismay, Erik just shrugged and said, "Isn't that how it started? Drawing shapes in the sky?"

Her father bought her a chart to trace each year for her birthday after that. It wasn't until she was almost 10 that she stopped marking them up, and another four years before she began pestering him to show her the real life versions of what the charts depicted.

The next time she meets Erik (_really_ meets him, not just a 'hello' in passing at some family event or another) is the night of her father's funeral.

Once it gets dark she retreats upstairs to the balcony where her father's (now _her_) telescope sits. It's not that she doesn't appreciate everyone else is grieving too, it's that she can't deal with another person asking her how she's holding up, or alternatively making useless small talk to determine it for themselves through direct observation. It's been a long day at the end of what was a long month and she's completely, utterly exhausted.

She and her mother exchange a glance, and when her mother gives her a sympathetic smile, Jane steals up the stairs. She doesn't expect to find someone else there, but Erik is peering into the telescope, adjusting it, and looking again. Before Jane can turn around, he spies her. "Ah, Jane. Apologies, I just—needed some fresh air."

"Yeah," she says, and decides to join him. He is, after all, one of her father's oldest and closest friends. Practically an uncle, with how often he comes over to work on a grant or discuss some theory or other. And unlike everyone else, she hasn't interacted with him fifty times already. "Me too."

He looks like he's about to say something, probably, 'I'm sorry about your father' or a variation on that theme, then he seems to decide not to. Instead, he nods at the telescope.

"Yours?"

"And dad's." She draws a little closer. "What were you looking at?"

"Canopus," he says, and gestures to the south. Jane leans in to look. There it sits, hovering just above the horizon line; the second brightest star in the night sky.

She straightens and looks overhead. "It's pretty clear tonight. I bet we can see a lot of Jupiter's cloud belts."

Erik raises his eyebrows and tilts his head, and Jane repositions the telescope.

* * *

Darcy is the fifth person to interview for the intern position. Dr. Jane Foster is something of a name in academic circles; daughter of a lauded cosmologist, possessed of more than one PhD at the ripe old age of thirty and known as the graduate student who made significant improvements in radio telescope resolution in only her second year.

Darcy is not Jane's ideal candidate, not by a long shot. She's taken above-average science requirements, but nothing beyond those, she has little to no relevant work experience, and she's a political science major of all the things.

"Why _did_ you apply for this internship, again?"

"One, because you're going to be moving around, and experience in other locations is good for the resume. Two, you said you needed someone who could handle a computer."

Jane frowns at Darcy's CV. "You're not a computer science major."

"Oh, no, nooooooo. Have you _taken_ those classes? CSE is one big manchild-fest. Also, it's for people who want to research computers. I _use_ computers. Not the same thing. Do you know how many CSE grads don't know the first thing about networking? Like, half of them."

Jane has worked with enough actual hardware and software engineers, as opposed to computer scientists, to know these things are true. She grills Darcy on her practical computer experience, which it turns out isn't lacking. (In some dim corner of her mind it occurs to Jane that Darcy has just casually used the term 'manchild-fest' at what amounts to a job interview, and it probably says a few things about both of them that Darcy did it without flinching and Jane failed to react at all.)

"So what you really want is something to put on your resume that shows you can do this."

Darcy snaps her fingers and points at Jane. "Exactly."

Jane bites her lip. "It's not paid."

"Didn't expect it to be."

"And there's probably no job waiting for you at the end. With me, I mean." Jane laughs at a half-formed notion. "Unless I get enough money to form my own lab. I'd need an administrator then. But don't hold your breath on that."

Darcy shrugs. "No worries. Experience is experience."

* * *

She meets Thor several times in several different ways.

First, she meets the crazy, nonsense-babbling, homeless man she hits with her car while chasing wormholes. He can understand and be understood by anyone no matter what language is involved, which makes Jane wonder if he's pulling a superbly elaborate con, but she can't see how he can do that in a town as small as Puente Antiguo, where she knows everyone by their first name. Despite being to all appearances completely out of his element, he takes everything in stride. If something confuses him, he spends a minute becoming acclimated, then moves on.

After the crater site expedition doesn't go as planned he stops being a jerk and starts becoming someone else. Someone relatively tolerable. He reads her journal and they have an extended conversation about cosmology without him losing track of the discussion. On the whole, she thinks she could have been okay with that guy being all there was: a little weird, but not outside the bounds of tolerable.

Then that Thor dies and she meets the demi-god who says he'll come back and doesn't. It's amazing (the part where he's not dead like he was two minutes ago) and horrible (the part where the bridge collapses and they're all left standing there) all at once. She spends one year telling herself she'll find a way to open a wormhole and another thinking he doesn't remember her and diving head-first into her work, because that's how she deals with this kind of thing.

Next she meets the alien who comes from a society which has woven science and magic into their everyday lives, and whose father is kind of a jackass, and whose brother might be psychotic (given what he did to Erik and New York she's leaning towards 'yes' on that one). His friends seem pretty okay and she would like to get to know them better. In fact she would love to spend a few lifetimes exploring Asgard and pulling every last one of its secrets apart until she can understand them, but there's a superweapon lurking inside of her, and a different alien is trying to get it back and destroy the universe, so all of that has to wait.

And finally, when he comes back to Earth (back to _her_), humble and alone and with most of his family dead and having ditched his inheritance, she thinks she's actually meeting the first Thor, the guy who was tolerably weird, all over again. He's not mortal this time and now she knows he isn't crazy, yet he's every bit as displaced and grieving for what he's lost as well as given up. There's also the 'I cannot believe this kind of thing is happening to me' relationship they throw themselves into that is confusing and intense in ways she's not always prepared for. It works the way some of Jane's earlier experiments 'worked', which is to say, with a great deal of trial and error, but as with her work the joy has so far outweighed the difficulty.

She has a thousand questions to ask him, because that's how she meets people—she asks them questions—and it feels like there cannot possibly be enough time in her life to ask them all. Answering them seems to help him in some way or another, even make him happy, so she asks, and asks, and asks, and he is tireless in his explanations.

"What's Asgard?"

"What is it?" He sounds confused by the question.

"It's not a planet, right? What is it, then?"

She's at Kitt Peak for the weekend, and he's come with her. Her observation time for the night is done and the numbers are crunching on Stark's computing cluster, and with a few hours of darkness left they've driven off the mountain and hiked out into the cactus and sage. They're far enough that the lights of the observatory are a distant, dim glow, and the rocky ground is warm under their heavy, knit blanket as it radiates back the summer heat it spent all day soaking up. The Milky Way stretches overhead, flanked by familiar constellations that Jane can't see when they're in London or New York.

Thor makes a low sound of understanding. Lying on their backs as they are, he's mostly a warm presence and a low, deep voice next to her. "It is a constructed Realm."

"So you built yourselves a world?"

"Our oldest ancestors did. The first of the Æsir."

Every answer just gives rise to more questions. Did they come from a planet? Why did they leave it? (_Did_ they leave it?) What were they, before they were 'Æsir'?

She decides to save all of that for later. "What's it built from?"

"They found a small well, and used the material it had pulled to itself to build the Realm. Then they contained the well within the World Engine to give the Realm power."

_Well_. She turned the term over in her head a few times. "So the machine that...runs Asgard, is driven by a small black hole?"

"Yes."

"Probably a Schwarzschild," Jane says to herself. An entire world, powered by Hawking radiation, or something _like_ Hawking radiation. But how could they be managing that? They'd have to have a way to feed it so it wouldn't evaporate—

"Is this what you call them?"

She drags herself back to the current thread of the conversation. "We have a lot of names for them. Our knowledge about black holes is changing all the time, so _everyone_ likes to hang a name on them when they figure something out. Schwarzschild derived a way to explain a kind of black hole, so, we call those Schwarzschilds."

She feels him nod. "Then when you succeed in building your own Bifröst, will it be called a Foster?"

It makes her giddy when he talks about her accomplishments like foregone conclusions. He's one of five people in her entire life who've ever done that. "If I want to be nice to Einstein and Rosen, I'll probably call it an Einstein-Rosen-Foster."

"That is unwieldy. Just 'Foster' by itself is much better."

She laughs. "When I write that paper I'll make sure to take your naming suggestions under advisement." She clears her throat. "Since meeting you _did_ move a lot of this along, and all."

He turns his head and sighs against her neck, and as she stares up at the stars she's struck by how small the chance was that she was the one to find him, and not someone else—someone not an astrophysicist, someone not looking for answers to questions only a few people were bothering to ask. It could have so easily been SHIELD (or HYDRA, or whatever they were), or the military, or any number of other people who would have used the knowledge he represented in much different and no doubt far worse ways. (Especially for him, since he'd been mortal and lost and at everyone's mercy at the time, not that anyone could tell from how he behaved.)

"Indeed," he murmurs. "I am very glad we met."

She finds and follows the shape of Draco in the sky, from the tip of the tail through the deep arc of the body, over the rise of the neck and back down to the club-head.

She takes his hand in hers. "So am I," she says, and tries to decide what to ask next.


End file.
